Attitude Readjustment [Was: Chemical attractant, for men and women...]

[Jeffrey Goldberg <jeffrey@goldmark.org>]

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On Mon, 18 Dec 2000 sales@snet.co.uk wrote:

> SIR
> we get spammed every day
> we dont whinge

Thank you for your response.  You are probably surprised that I am writing
back (or writing back without profanity).  The reason for that is simple:
One precondition for an MAPS RBL nomination is an attempt to educuate the
spam-friendly site prior to formally nominating it for blacklisting.

First I will give you some resources for information on why spam should
be fought, and then I will give you some information about the
consequences to you of a successful RBL nomination.  I am cc'ing your
provider, newnet.co.uk, because if it turns out that they are a spam
friendly network provider this applies to them as well.

There are a lot of site with explanations for the clueless (you) about why
spam is bad.  Let's start with

 http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/rationale.html

and

 http://spam.abuse.net/spambad.html


I will also point you to a document (which I helped to write) justifying
the blacklisting of sites and networks because of spam.

 http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/ccc/email/siteblocking.html

What that document highlights is fundamental difference between spam and
postal junk mail.  With the latter, the sender pays the cost (and indeed
both the US Postal Service and the Royal Mail actually use the profits
from that to subsidies normal letter carrying.)  With spam the recipient
and recipients system pays (albeit a very very small amount).

To address your implied question:  Why whinge when you can simply delete
it?

Well, imagine if absolutely nobody ever complained about spam.  If there
were no sanctions or threats whatsoever.  Because of the economics of spam
(the recipient pays the marginal cost, not the sender) then everyone would
be spamming massively.  If, say, today 20 percent of email traffic is
spam, then with no pressure on spammers at all 99.999 percent would be
spam.  Under those circumstances email would be unusable for anybody.
The reason that there is a usable email system is because thousands of
people like me try to shift the cost of spamming from the recipient
networks as a whole to the spammers.  It is only due to the activities of
anti-spammers that there is a system for you to abuse.

Now I'd like to tell you the some of the consequences of getting
blacklisted should a nomination be successful.

Many networks, including the biggest ISPs in the UK (at least freeserve,
demon and most of .ac.uk) make use of various "Realtime Blackhole Lists"
(RBL). Most make use of several, but all of those (and many many more
sites) make use of the so-called MAPS RBL.

If your mail server or network has its IP addresses listed in the MAPS RBL
then those sites using MAPS will refuse mail from your users.  Not just
from the spammers, but from all of your users.  Your customers will find
that their mail to many domains simply bounces.  Depending of the
configuration of mail servers in between those bounces may have a pointer
to the following website

  http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/enduser.html

If you wish to see that that does not happen to your customers you should
avoid doing the things that get you on the MAPS RBL.  For information
about what gets you on that list, see

 http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/candidacy.html

So far, your behaviour is very consistent with getting on to the list.
To use geek speak, you require an "attitude readjustment".  I hope that
this message helps achive that.

- -j

- -- 
Jeffrey Goldberg
I have recently moved, see http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/contact.html
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
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